(1) Scale up success not failureThe only reason for mentioning this is that the aid business has a strange habit of trying to scale up again things that have already failed. PROGRESA is the great success story of scaling up something after you had determined it was successful.

(2) Don’t scale up what you think is most important, scale up what you do bestThere are lots of important issues, so why not choose the one that you do best? And let the people who are good at the other issues work on the other issues? Yet both official agencies and NGOs are often pulled away from what they do best by well-meaning politicians and funders who are focused only on final goals.

(3) You can scale up only what requires cheap, abundant inputs; you cannot scale up something that depends on expensive, scarce inputsThis is one of my problems with the Millennium Villages – they at least partly depend on world-class experts flying in to solve idiosyncratic problems of each village. World-class experts are a scarce resource that you can’t scale up.

(4) Things that you make routine are among the easiest to scale upIt worked for Henry Ford, McDonald’s, and WalMart, why not in aid? One of the secrets to success of the large vaccination campaigns that reduced child mortality was that relatively unskilled medical workers (in abundant supply) could give vaccinations as a routine activity. Of course, not everything can be made routine. For a more complex discussion about social service delivery in general, see the great paper by Lant Pritchett and Michael Woolcock.

(5) Evaluate whether you are still successful after scaling upScaling up often changes the nature of what you are doing, so evaluate whether the scaled-up version works as well as the original version.

I don't have a hard-and-fast adherence to one side or the other of the vitriolic Easterly-Sachs debate, but Easterly usually strikes me as quite commonsense and reasonable, and these principles are no exception. The White Man's Burden remains one of the best books on economic development that I've ever read, and encapsulates well his bottom-up philosophy (the polar opposite of Sachs' top-down Millenium Villages approach).

My Shelfari Bookshelf

Find new books and literate friends with Shelfari, the online book club.

Copyright People and Resources 2009. The opinions expressed here are mine alone and do not necessarily reflect the views of my current or former employers or colleagues. I make no representations as to the accuracy, completeness, or general validity anything presented in this blog and will not be held liable for any errors, omissions, losses, injuries or damages arising from my postings.